French Cheat Sheet – une antisèche pour la langue française

Today I created a cheat sheet for French. I looked on the Internet for a French cheat sheet but I did not find exactly what I was looking for. Most of the French cheat sheets are only good for tourists because they just give you the basic phrases. If you are serious about learning the language, you need to master the grammar so a cheat sheet should show you how to conjugate the verbs. I designed my cheat sheet to look like the cheat sheets that are available for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other information technology topics. You can find those kinds of cheat sheets at http://www.addedbytes.com/cheat-sheets/.

Although I’m learning French for personal reasons, the web is a global community so this does relate to my profession. A business can expand beyond the local market by communicating with the French, the Germans, and other nationalities. I’ve been interacting with a lot of people from other countries through YouTube and Vloggerheads; mostly Brits, Canadians, and Australians but also a few Germans, one Croatian, one Greek, and expats living in French but no actual French native. The Elgg social networking developer community is also international and I have to keep that in mind when I develop my plugins. When I released my weather widget I got some feedback suggesting that I create an international version that supports temperatures in Celsius and the weather in other countries. I had to find a source of international weather, the Weather Underground, instead of using the National Weather Service.

I have not mastered the French language yet, but I can now comprehend a great deal of the text on French web sites. This opens up a whole new world of information, culture, and news. I can watch French TV on YouTube (mostly news reports) and listen to French radio stations through streaming audio feeds. Unfortunately I still cannot understand a word of spoken French so I’ll probably spend more time lurking on French message boards.